A flowering day

I love Fridays - not only do you have the weekend to look forward to but usually people tend to take extended lunch hours together (a full hour as opposed to a hasty 15 minutes) or leave slightly earlier than usual (at 6 rather than 7 or 8), especially if the weather is fine. This Friday morning, M and I got off a few tube stops earlier at Russell Square and strolled through Bloomsbury before parting for our respective offices. This is a sweet, lovely habit I want to stick to.

Later, during lunch, we met up on Tottenham Court Road and popped into a few computer stores as we're looking to buy a new PC. The laptop we have, though just 2 years old, just doesn't cut it for all the iTunes downloading and home movie editing I want to do. 2 years of course is the computer equivalent of 80 human years! Then we popped over to Charlotte Street for a quick meal at Josephine's - the Filipino restaurant. M kept his Blackberry on the table as we tucked into noodles with prawns and chicken in peanut sauce with fresh coriander.

We'll definitely come back here for dinner - the menu was packed with fish and seafood dishes, plus many with black pudding which surprised me at first but then I remembered that the Philippines were once a Spanish colony. Even without the Spanish influence, some east Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan and China have some variation of blood sausage. I've always enjoyed black pudding. This always grosses most people out, but one of my favourite food experiences in South Dakota, aside from the sublime fillet mignon - the Dakotas being cattle ranching country - was on the Cheyenne River reservation where a medicine man-cum-carpenter (medicine man by night and during holy seasons and carpenter by day) made me a savoury sauce of beef's blood to dunk my bread into.

Back to London... Charlotte Street was heaving not with tourists but with office workers. Restaurants, bars and cafes pack themselves into this street. The sun was blazing, everyone was smiling, making the most of their extended lunch breaks too. Last summer, I remember overhearing an American tourist walking down Oxford Street moaning, "There's nowhere to eat in London!" I should have pulled her by her brightly coloured rucksack and said, "Turn left into Soho or right into Fitzrovia and you'll find a diverse wealth of places to eat, you lazy cow!" All she had to do was to stray a little off the beaten track...

In the evening, we met up in Farringdon at the bratwurst cafe Kurz & Lang for beers and hearty German sausages with fried potatoes, sauerkraut and mustard. Perched on high tables and stools outside, we watched the City boys and girls try and outdo each other with braying banter and copious amounts of booze.

This would have been enough for an evening's entertainment but earlier this year I had booked tickets for John Adams' A Flowering Tree at the Barbican. I booked them because I was very conscious that apart from Philip Glass and Steve Reich, I know very little about modern classical music. I had always read about Californian composer John Adams and had heard snippets of his famous Nixon In China. And we had great centre front seats in the stalls.

A Flowering Tree is a modern opera influenced by Mozart's The Magic Flute and based on a 2000-year old Tamil story about the redemptive love between a prince and a poor girl who transforms herself into a flowering tree in order to shed her flowers for sale to support her aging mother. But the girl's jealous sister-in-law persuades her to transform in front of her friends and they break off her branches, leaving her limbless and unable to transform herself back into human form. Separated from one another, the prince and the limbless tree girl languish - the pain of separation unbearable. But eventually they are reunited by servants. The tree girl is nurtured back to health and humanity and their love is restored and deepened.

Highlights for me were the lighting, which pulsed through blood red through turquoise blue to iridescent green; the tree girl soprano's exquisite voice that sounded like undulations of crystal clear water coursing up and down and through my body; the dramatic mixed choir from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela dressed in traditional rainbow-hued Indian dress.

I've heard that John Adams was once considered a minimalist, but I would never have guessed. This was an unabashedly rich and romantic, multi-textured and shimmering performance.

Transitions

After my last post, I've received a number of emails about how I managed to transition from anthropology to advertising. It wasn't as swift a move as it sounds. My entire academic life has been geared up towards being a teacher of some kind. Between my undergraduate degree and MPhil, I taught English literature at a well-regarded boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. My dream then was not simply to teach, but to immerse myself better in Indian culture having been born and brought up in the very English Kentish countryside. I hadn't even been fortunate enough to have had an Indian friend growing up, so suddenly finding myself surrounded by Indians as an Indian was wonderful and life-transforming.

As an undergraduate, I was inspired by my supervisor to read some books on Native North Americans. So when I decided to study for my PhD in anthropology, it was a no brainer for me to choose a research topic in that area. By this time I had decided I wanted to lecture at university level and essentially pursue an academic career. My parents were beside themselves with pride - education being highly-esteemed among West Bengalis.

A PhD requires original research. To do this I had to get my head out of the books, my arse off my seat and go to the source. To Pine Ridge Indian and Cheyenne River reservations in South Dakota I went, camera in one hand, tape recorder in another. Unlike my blonde, blue-eyed friend in the previous post, my life among the Lakota Sioux was easy - the elders particularly were tickled pink by the fact that I was a real Indian and we joked about it often. The fact that I was brown and even looked a little American Indian myself, opened all sorts of doors. Once, in New Mexico, I was even asked by a Navajo if I was Navajo! My parents stayed with me for a few weeks there and had long chats with my Lakota friends about the similarities between American Indian and Indian Indian cultures. My mother in her sari had the children at Crazy Horse School on Pine Ridge virtually crawling all over her in excitement at her exoticness.

Many of the educated Lakota I worked with were keen on disseminating their own stories, their own descriptions of their culture, and their own political views - fed up and frustrated by the constant filtering of their lives to the world by white anthropologists. Though I was not white, I was a guilty anthropologist nonetheless. I sat with them as they set out their own messages off- and online. It was my first real engagement with new media and political advertising. It was also my first exposure to web programming.

After a year, I returned to Oxford and my PhD; I delivered papers at conferences and published them; I became a lecturer while finishing off my thesis. But a seed of doubt had been sown. I began feeling uncomfortable in my role as an anthropologist, writing endless papers and teaching - basically pontificating on a culture that firstly wasn't mine and secondly that had its own educators, writers, lecturers.

A lengthy break from academia due to illness allowed me to pursue other things. I pursued getting better, and I pursued web programming. When I was able to complete my PhD and re-enter the job market, I started to apply for new media posts - chancing my luck because of my lack of experience in that field and keeping my lecturing career open as a fallback option. I was primarily applying to charities and, luckily, most people were intrigued rather than put off by my experiences. I guess I was a refreshing change from the usual geeky IT or internet applicants.

Charities run their off- and online marketing activities just like their for-profit counterparts. Their goals are the same: to sell something, whether a campaign, a belief, a product or a service. When I felt the need for another change, a few years later, I discovered that the leap from non-profit to commercial advertising and marketing was not that difficult. Interviewing for my current job in the commerical sector was enjoyable - my colleagues are still intrigued by my anthropological background and I like to think it gives me insight into my clients.

You might live in South Dakota

I remember one day in June, Rapid City, South Dakota. All week, the heat had been fierce, with temperatures passing 100 degrees. We planned to go out to hear a talk at Crazy Horse Monument, in the Black Hills, and take a picnic with us. But when we awoke, the streets were thick with snow and the temperature had plummeted. No one batted an eyelid, even though we sat huddled in quilted coats on cold metal chairs outside in the snow, watching the speaker's breath curl away from the podium towards Crazy Horse's rock nostril. A couple of days later, the heatwave returned and still no one thought it extraordinary. They commented on it for a few minutes, then resumed their work.

Although I was in South Dakota for just one year, I recognise each and every line of this satire on the Plains state by comedian Jeff Foxworthy - sent to me by my wonderful friend Beth, a Dakotan. He writes:

If you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping that the food will swim by, you might live in South Dakota. If you're proud that your region makes the national news 96 nights each year because Milbank is the coldest spot in the nation, you might live in South Dakota. If your local Dairy Queen is closed from November through March, you might live in South Dakota. If you instinctively walk like a penguin for five months out of the year, you might live in South Dakota. If someone in a store offers you assistance, and they don't work there, you might live in South Dakota. If your dad's suntan stops at a line curving around the middle of his forehead, you might live in South Dakota. If you have worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you might live in South Dakota. If your town has an equal number of bars and churches, you might live in South Dakota. If you have had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number, you might live in South Dakota. You know you are a true South Dakotan when: 'Vacation' means going east or west on I-90 for the weekend. You measure distance in hours. You know several people who have hit a deer more than once. You often switch from 'heat' to 'A/C' in the same day and back again. You can drive 65 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching. You see people wearing camouflage at social events (including weddings). You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked. You carry jumper cables in your car and your girlfriend knows how to use them. You design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit. Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow. You know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction. Your idea of creative landscaping is a statue of a deer next to your blue spruce. You were unaware that there is a legal drinking age. Down South to you means Nebraska. A brat is something you eat. Your neighbor throws a party to celebrate his new pole shed. You go out to a tail gate party every Friday. Your 4th of July picnic was moved indoors due to frost. You have more miles on your snow blower than your car. You find 0 degrees 'a little chilly'.

Photos: I took the first photo in the South Dakota Badlands, on the cusp of the Black Hills. The second is of a road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where I did much of my research on Lakota Sioux environmentalism.

I fell in love with western South Dakota for many reasons. One of them is the landscape that varies so dramatically within just a few miles: the pine-scented forests and granite mountains of the Black Hills; the solemn austerity of the Badlands, which, with the sun, pass through every colour from rose pink through blazing orange; and the undulating prairies that truly are oceanic.

I must admit, I was a little wary of going to the Dakotas. When I was in line at the American Embassy in London getting my visa several Americans in the queue were completely baffled as to why I would go to that "godforsaken" state, making me anxious about going to the "back of beyond". And yet once there, besides the generic "cowboys and Indians" population (many tribal elders used to joke that in meeting me they had finally met a "real Indian" at last) I found a sizeable artistic community of painters, poets and healers. Western South Dakota was also filled with city migrants from Chicago, New York City, Denver and San Francisco.

By the way, I met my first real cowboys in South Dakota - another reason I fell in love with the place. Beth, I change my mind - let's go back to South Dakota this year!